Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is the term applied to the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is, in fact, a subset of the broader process of Information Retrieval (IR), and is a relatively new but quickly growing field. MIR typically focuses on using the content of the music to locate bibliographic information about the music.
The rapid growth of MIR is believed to be a direct result of people currently having access to massive amounts of music, typically digital music, as compared to people in earlier time periods. This increase in music availability has several contributing factors, possibly the most significant being almost universal access to the Internet, where virtually an unlimited amount of digital music is available for listening and/or downloading. Advances in electronic hardware (e.g., computer, MP3 player, cellular telephone, etc.) technology have also contributed to the increase in demand for MIR systems.
It is becoming somewhat commonplace for individuals to have hundreds, if not thousands, of digital songs on their home computers or portable audio players. MIR offers new ways to search such massive amounts of music (i.e., music databases) and to locate and/or retrieve music therefrom.
Currently available query methods for finding music (e.g., query by genre, year, artist, album title, song title, or lyrics) work for many situations. These types of bibliographic queries for music are estimated to account for over 80% of people's music query needs. However, MIR offers additional query possibilities for situations such as when a user can only remember excerpts of musical content (e.g., a melody) and does not know the lyrics or any other textual (i.e., bibliographic) information about the piece for which he/she is searching.
While MIR methods exist for retrieving musical information from a database using musical content, such methods often require extensive musical training for a user and/or yield inconsistent and generally poor results. Thus, there exists a need for systems and methods of retrieving musical information from a database using musical content which do not require extensive musical training, yield better results, and are user-friendly.